


Through the Looking Glass

by SegaBarrett



Category: Oz (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29542890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: there's a monster under my bed // there are voices inside my head
Relationships: Tobias Beecher/Chris Keller
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3
Collections: Oz Magi





	Through the Looking Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vanillalime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillalime/gifts).



Toby can hear Chris breathing. He always can, if he focuses on it enough, but tonight it’s all that fills his head and seems to become music somehow. Kind of twisted, broken music, but music nonetheless.

If Toby thinks about it, he can picture the Tobias Beecher that once was. But he doesn’t really want to think about it because that man feels like a stranger, and that man did not know Chris Keller, and that man was blind to just how low a person can go and, somehow, still remain alive for reasons that aren’t altogether clear.

How much a man can take and still keep ticking.

Sometimes, he’s sure that the walls are closing in on him, and he knows that’s probably some kind of optical illusion. But maybe not.

In Oz, sometimes it seems as if everything that seems like it should be pretend is real and everything that is real should be pretend.

He wonders what would happen if he climbed up and rousted Chris from his slumbers. Would Chris tell him to shut up and go back to bed, or would he wile away the gray hour with him?

It could really go either way, and anyway, Toby’s frozen in his spot and can’t move even if he wanted to.

There are things dancing along the bottom of Chris’ bunk, seeming to sneak out to wave at Toby. Snakes, maybe. Ever since he met Schillinger long ago, snakes have figured deeply into Toby’s hallucinations.

If he could, he would get up and just start screaming and never stop. He wondered what they would do, then – just take him to another unit, maybe transfer him into a psych ward somewhere? Or would they just let him keep going and assume he would stop on his own eventually? Put in earplugs, maybe?

But Toby’s out of breath and energy for the task of screaming. So he looks up and wonders if he could climb into Chris’ brain and think the same thoughts that Chris is always thinking.

***

Toby must have fallen asleep at some point, and when he wakes up, everything is a lot hazier than he would rather it all be. It’s like someone has turned all the color down to make it desaturated, or like he’s played a memory so many times that the tape on a projector has started to split apart.

“Toby?”

He hears Chris’ voice, all right – and he’ll always know it, even if he couldn’t see at all. But he can’t find it in himself to respond. There’s the feeling that something has finally broken in him, something at last, and he doesn’t know what caused it or have any idea about how to fix it.

“Toby,” Chris calls again, and now he has begun to shake him. Toby really wants to tell him to just get lost, to stop, but again the words won’t leave his throat. It feels as if he’s stepped into a fog and maybe he’ll fade away.

That’s when Chris leans down to kiss him, and it’s such a weird breath-of-life moment that Toby jolts and twitches and comes back alive again. With Chris’ lips on his, the world melts back into the real color that he’d once known – not that there’s very much of it around the cell.

“What’s wrong with you, Toby?” Chris asks, and Toby isn’t even sure where to begin.

***

If he could, he’s sure that he would take it all back, that he would call a cab the night that he plowed over Kathy Martin with his car.

Then he would be asleep in his bed right now, a blanket wrapped around him as he probably slept off another night of drinking.

He’d still be married. He would roll out of bed and see his kids coming to greet him.

And as much as he would still be whole, in oh so many ways, he would have a chunk missing from him, too.

Maybe that was what he had been chasing in all of those drunken nights, and he couldn’t put a name to it. Because what he was looking for was Chris, long before he had any idea who Chris was.

“Chris,” he calls, and Chris stirs, moving to the side on the bed to crane his head down to look at Toby with a smirk.

“What?”

“Would you take it all back? Everything you’ve done?”

Chris shrugs and seems to nearly lose his balance. Toby imagines him falling to the ground and splitting into a million pieces, and each of the pieces becoming an independent Chris of its very own, and all of the little Chrises dancing and singing some kind of bizarre melody, like a Chris Keller version of the Oompa Loompa song, or maybe the Munchkin Land song. Toby shakes his head to clear it.

When he comes back to, there’s only one Chris, and he’s still looking at him, though he’s starting to look at him with that damned cat-ate-the-canary sort of look, the kind of looks that’s dangerous on a man like Chris Keller.

It’s a very lucky thing that Toby can be dangerous, too.

So he rolls until he’s down by the edge of the bed, then gingerly climbs to stand on the metal right beyond the end of the mattress. He stands tall, tall enough that he can look Chris in the eye but still keep his distance.

“Hello, Chris,” he says with a kind of nonchalant danger, trying to bring up the casual giddiness of Clemenza about to execute Carlo Rizzi. “How are you?”

Chris blinks, then moved into a sitting position. At least now, Toby seems to have gotten him off-kilter. It used to always be Chris with the advantage, didn’t it? Toby has to ask himself the question because time… time has become indistinct as of late.

Time has become an ever-rolling ball that Toby can’t always balance without losing it.

Time has stretched him past his limit.

“What’s going on, Toby?” Chris asks. He leans forward a little bit more, as if he’s not sure which version of Toby he’s about to get.

The version that’s going to kiss him, or the version that’s about to strangle him.

And as Toby leans forward and presses his fingers ever-so-gently to Chris’ neck, he finds that he doesn’t know which one he is anymore, either.

And that’s the beauty.


End file.
